Jonathan Burdon – Apparently posting facts is a “Smear Campaign”

I have written a pretty in-depth review of Jonathan Burdon and AlreadyHosting.com concerning their affiliate fraud campaigns here. I even discovered that Jonathan Burdon is directly using cookie stuffing to obtain fraudulent affiliate commissions. You can watch a short video demonstrating the cookie stuffing for MDDHosting, BlueHost, HostMonster, and WebHostingPad in this video. If you’re not very familiar with how affiliate systems work, the basic premise is that sites will use outbound links to the provider that place a cookie on the user’s computer to identify the referral so that the affiliate can be paid.

In an article about Jonathan Burdon [which is likely written by Jonathan] it is claimed that “There is one *unnamed* company on the web that refuses to pay Jonathan for his contract so they have launched a smear campaign against him, please ignore their comments,” and the article goes on to say “If users will take a few moments to visit Jonathan’s sites they will soon realize that his site is a great resource and that the individuals writing the slanderous posts about him are simply incorrect.” Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/branding-articles/jonathan-burdon-webmaster-2848333.html

It seems that Jonathan Burdon believes that I’m personally launching a smear campaign about him and goes so far as to claim my posts are slanderous. What I find particularly interesting, is that I have only posted verifiable, factual information and even the email communications with Jonathan Burdon. I’ve not posted or said anything that wasn’t simply true and verifiable. To be entirely honest, I don’t care about Jonathan Burdon or his reputation but only that he doesn’t continue committing affiliate fraud and, as such, stealing money from other hosting providers. I publicly challenge Jonathan Burdon to disprove any of the information I’ve posted about him or AlreadyHosting.com.

I’ll be straight and to the point as to why Jonathan Burdon (AlreadyHosting.com) has not been paid for their affiliate commissions – they’ve committed affiliate fraud and, as such, we terminated them as an affiliate. In performing cookie stuffing, not only has Jonathan’s site immediately taken credit for everybody who visited his page whether the page was helpful or not in the provider obtaining said new customer but it has done so under the false pretenses of being a “Review” of which the page was most certainly not. Any provider that relies upon word of mouth and quality reviews to obtain customers will have a large portion of their customers who simply search Google for reviews of their company. As soon as one of our potential customers clicks on the AlreadyHosting.com link to read the review of MDDHosting they will already be giving AlreadyHosting.com credit for the purchase even if the visitor was only on the page for a tenth of a second and didn’t find any useful information.

Jonathan Burdon has submitted a DMCA Takedown Notice to us and our data center to have his email conversation removed from public view under the false pretense of his emails being “original works” that he claims are protected by U.S. Copyright Laws. While I do very much appreciate Copyright laws and their protection of intellectual property; I do believe publishing of Jonathan Burdon’s emails qualify under “fair use” and, as such, as soon as the DMCA Takedown period has passed (10 to 14 days) said emails will be published here once again along with some more emails not yet published.

It is my own personal opinion that the only one being damaging to Jonathan Burdon’s reputation is Jonathan Burdon.

Update – 07/24/2010

Upon further research it does appear that Mr. Burdon is indeed correct about emails and copyright and as such the emails that were previously posted and removed due to his DMCA notification will not be reposted.

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11 comments

Even though I am not involved with the operation of MDDHosting, this Jonathan Burdon is beginning to make my blood boil. I would love to see Burdon bring this thing to court and I will fully support Mike and way I can. This guy’s website is a complete sham and it disappoints me that he would even try to defend this. Mike, best of luck with this situation and just for this, I will promise to buy 2 more years of hosting after my current plan is up.

This Jonathan guy really does not use good business sense does He? I feel He needs some business relationship development courses to help him through further interactions with customers in the future, if any.

I assume you probably keep tabs on the affiliate industry, but in case you haven’t, here is an interesting development.

There is a case against some people associated with Digital Point Forums where they are being indicted for fraud based on cookie stuffing their EBay affiliate marketing campaigns ()if I read the story right anyway. You can read about the story here:

@Tammy
Interesting find – admittedly my goal was never to cause him any trouble… In my opinion he is the one that caused troubles for himself. I did at one point in time offer for us to both part ways and go our separate directions and leave it at that but he demanded that I pay him for fraudulent affiliate referrals and threatened to “destroy our SEO with his SEO power.”